CTDH Conference

Chair: Francesca Baird

Di Luo, "Photogrammetric Modeling in Surveying and Teaching Chinese Architecture"
The presentation I propose is half demonstration and half traditional (slide-show) presentation. The first ten minutes demonstrate the basics of 3D photogrammetric modeling using Autodesk ReCap Photo. I will showcase the workflow of generating a 3D digital architectural model, from taking photographs to the cropping and editing of the raw model, then to the publication of the refined model on the Internet. This is to demystify the techniques of photogrammetry. For the next ten minutes, I will share my thoughts on several broader issues related to photogrammetry: how it can be used in fieldwork to assist general surveys of buildings and what impacts it has made on the study, the preservation, and the teaching and learning of architecture. For my research on miniature and small-scale architecture in China, photogrammetry proves an invaluable tool to document the meticulous detail of the architectural interior. It complements traditional survey methods especially in cases where complex ceiling structures and ornate decorations render conventional measuring tools inefficient or inept. The ceiling of the Jingtusi monastery (1124 CE) is the major example of my current research on the wooden domes of Chinese architecture. Photogrammetry not only provides a 360 degree view of the ceiling but has further generated orthographic drawings for quantitative analyses of the scale and the structure. My presentation further showcases four more wooden domes I have surveyed using photogrammetry. The 3D models map out the visibility of the various parts of the ceilings and help to understand the purpose of image-making in Chinese domes. The digital “other life” or “afterlife” of the ceilings raises the issues of authenticity and replication, of the loss of the “aura” and the distortion of the scale, adding to the ongoing debates on the role of digital art. The presentation will include a few student-made models and reflect on how photogrammetry can be adopted in classrooms to enhance teaching and learning.

Sarah Oberbichler, Manfred Moosleitner, and Mag. Katharina Gallner-Holzmann, "DigiVis: Ways of analyzing and visualizing the digital estate of Ernst von Glasersfeld"
The extensive estate of the philosopher, communication scientist and father of radical constructivism, Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010), has been available to the public at the Brenner Archive in Innsbruck (Austria) since 2013. A large part of the archive has already been digitised and since 2018, an interdisciplinary project team (computer scientists and humanities researchers) from the University of Innsbruck has been working on the analysis and visualization of the archive. In addition to network analyses, digital storytelling approaches and didactic processing, the visualization of argumentation structures in the scientific legacy is one of the main goals. For the analysis, established extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki or Semantic Text Annotator are used, as well as user-defined MediaWiki extensions to add tools for corpus-linguistic text analysis and natural language processing tasks (e.g. frequency analysis, topic modeling, co-occurence analysis and named entities recognition). Manual analyses and the interaction of manual and computer-aided analyses also play an important role. For the visualization, the team is working together closely with a specialist in data visualization. A further goal of the DigiVis project is to use the design principles of “generous interfaces” (Mitchell Whitelaw, 2015) to create a user-friendly and easily accessible interface for users with various backgrounds, ranging from students to experts. The talk shows the current state of the project (started October 2018), gives an outline of planned features, presents how our findings can be generalized and used for any digital archiving and preservation platform, and shows how MediaWiki is utilized as the core of the project.

Iris Bork-Goldfield and Jesse Simmons, "Genealogical Digital Story Telling: An Exploration"
Albert Alexander: In Transit to Success is the story of my great-great-grandfather who—like some German Jews—arrived on the shores of New York in the mid-nineteenth century only to return to the German Empire shortly after its founding in 1871. Albert was always on the move, from city to city, country to country, and street to street in both Germany and New York City. Therefore, maps were needed to tell this part of his story. For the past year, I have been experimenting with various programs. ArcGIS, with its many different templates, and for which Wesleyan has a site license, seemed to be a good program to use. My research assistant—an undergraduate student at Wesleyan—and I have been creating interactive maps, adding images, documents and screen shots of old maps, and links to an additional website created with WordPress to enhance the story. However, the question that we still have and are discussing is: Are there other—and possibly better—programs than ArcGIS for creating online genealogical digital stories for personal use but also as a pedagogical tool in the classroom? The presentation will show the advantages and the limitations of the above-mentioned program and application and, we hope, engage the audience in an enabling and revelatory discussion.

Chairs: Amanda Nelson

Dianne Fallon, "Reducing the digital divide: Exploring the Maine's Alien Registration order with community college students"
In my presentation, I will discuss how I am using the digital archive for Maine’s 1940 Alien Registration Order to introduce community college students to archival research, to the Omeka exhibition platform and concepts of metadata, and the use of spreadsheets in creating data visualizations, specifically with the tool “Flowmaps Blue.”  I will also explore how the archival research from another era helps students to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of immigration issues today, and also discuss pedagogical and ethical considerations in making student work public, especially when the work may need further documentation and editing. My presentation will include my Omeka site in progress as well as a basic explanation of how to use the “Flowmaps Blue” mapping tool.  Link: https://yorkcountyhistory.org/maine-alien-registration-order-of-1940/

Deb Smith and Lisa Timothy, "Using Omeka in Public Libraries to create local history collections"
Public librarians are frequently gatekeepers of valuable local history collections, but few receive or have any access to training in the creation of digital collections. The online course Creating Local Linkages, offered by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, specifically trains public librarians to create digital local history collections using Omeka. Omeka is a platform familiar to historians and academic librarians but much less well known to public librarians. Hear from two public librarians who have completed this course, exploring the benefits and challenges of using Omeka to create digital local history collections.  

The panel will address the practical challenges of creating digital history collections in public libraries, specifically covering issues such as staffing, time, training, funding and copyright. Opportunities and the benefits of wider collaboration between academia and public libraries will also be explored.

Patrick Murray-John, "A WordPress-Institutional Repository Connector, updated for WordPress 5 : The Gutenbergification"
Northeastern University uses a custom WordPress plugin for public facing web exhibitions using content from our institutional repository and other sources. Currently there are nearly forty sites produced by faculty research projects, teaching sites, and our archives and special collections. The original plugin was based on WordPress's shortcode system.

With WordPress 5, that shortcode system fell out of favor, with the preference moving toward the React-based Gutenberg editing interface.

This demonstration and discussion will compare and contrast the old and new systems of our WordPress plugin, with brief but detailed notes about the technical, user experience, and philosophical changes involved in the transition.

We will start with the close relationship between publication via WordPress and content management primarily with our institutional repository. Then, we will look at the affordances (and deficiencies) of WordPress as a publication platform with that technical dependency. Finally, the evolution of the plugin prompted by WordPress's development will address the constraints and possibilities in WordPress 5.

Chair: Joelle E. Thomas

Kristen Abbott Bennett,and Hedda Monaghan, "Creating Rams Write, a student-generated, public, online writing resource"
In Fall 2018, we initiated a collaboration between the Library and the English Department to create a model of digital student-scholarship that has resulted in Rams Write (https://libguides.framingham.edu/rams_write), an open-access, online guide designed by first-year writing students at Framingham State University to help their peers write strong academic essays. In these writing classes, students initially self-identified writing challenges before working in groups to research, design, and create copy for web exhibits addressing specific topics for public in the Henry Whittemore Library’s Research Guides (aka “LibGuides”) section of their website. Public-facing, student-generated digital humanities projects like Rams Write offer students the ability to experience knowledge-making in action. Students learn research, web design (here, in the LibGuides editor), and writing skills they need to make real-world, public-facing contributions to our knowledge base. Our primary learning outcomes from these projects are twofold. One has been that students develop “metaliteracies,” a pedagogical framework conceived by Trudi E. Jacobson and Tom Mackey that synthesizes cognitive, behavioral, affective, and metacognitive learning outcomes (see www.metaliteracies.org). The other is to deepen students’ facility with online information by drawing inspiration from the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework). This paper presentation offers an overview of the project’s driving pedagogies, learning outcomes, and a walk-through of the site itself.

Kelly Mahaffy, Tina Huey, and Karen Skudlarek, "Digital Humanities in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Ethics of Digital Approaches to Scholarship"
Digital humanities, and digital tools, represent some of the most exciting and engaging work being done in graduate and undergraduate humanistic classrooms. While these tools are tremendously useful, we must consider how instructors, as those with power in a classroom, can require or demand participation in a digital environment in which we often struggle to safeguard the circulation of student work.

We hope that, by opening our discussion to instructors at all stages of their careers and who rely on digital tools differently, we can begin to work against what Toby Coley describes as “uncritical acceptance of digital media technologies” which “inculcates something in our students’ psyches” and can have effects on their social lives outside the classroom community (100). To develop solutions to some of the most pressing questions in teaching with digital tools we hope to include conversations about: the intention behind digital tools in the classroom; the effect of the institution, particularly in their contracts with tech giants like Google or Microsoft for student email services; and how we can balance convenience and practicality with bigger picture privacy as well as what information we should share with our students about digital circulation. We hope to put ethical concerns at the center of the digital humanities discussion and insist that it belongs there. Given the many clear affordances of digital technologies, and that we are committed to continuing to create a safe space for our students, even online, we hope that this discussion will generate ideas about how to make the continued use of digital tools exciting, safe, and intentional for both students and instructors.

Marina Hassapopoulou, "Expanding DH through multimedia scholarship"
This workshop will consist of: a) a showcase of a range of multimedia scholarship and classroom projects, from digital and interactive to analog; b) an introduction to some DIY and easily accessible tools for digital modes of writing; c) suggestions for archiving practices that attempt to counter the ephemerality of digital work, along with some practical recommendations for ethically sharing content containing copyrighted material.
The projects and tools presented aim to provide an expanded understanding of the epistemological potential of DH practices, beyond typical uses of computational tools and data-driven approaches; the focus is on expanding traditional methodologies and writing platforms, rather than replacing them.

Chair: Andrew White
Dan Bennett, Cat Hannula, Mario Valdebenito Rodas, "Using Virtual Tools to Create Equitable Pathways into Physical Spaces"
Smith College’s central library is currently undergoing significant renovations. An essential portion of our first year libraries orientation program is a mandatory Libraries Scavenger Hunt dedicated to educating students on where they can still access library resources. Some of Smith College’s branch libraries are difficult to navigate which could limit some students’ ability to physically access these spaces. In order to provide an equitable solution, members of IT and the Libraries utilized 360º photography, H5P and WordPress to create 360º virtual tours as an inclusive alternative to help students complete the Scavenger Hunt.
Our presentation will discuss the conception, planning and implementation of this project, including organizational collaboration, stakeholder management, and the specific technologies used. We will also discuss how the results of this project are being implemented for public facing digital humanities projects in classes. This project is also being scaled in a way to provide the Smith community the ability to easily create more accessible pathways as our campus changes with the opening of our new library.


Madeline Miller, Victoria Corwin, Ellie Ng, Alexander Cotnoir, "Dartmouth Undying; using a library escape room to introduce open access concepts via zombie apocalypse"
How can gaming be used to interactively explore complex or unfamiliar materials and concepts? To engage college students and staff with Open Access concepts, primary sources, and research tools, our team of post-baccalaureate fellows built an escape room with materials from the media center, engineering school’s machine shop, institutional archives, and even discarded library book bins. In contrast to conventional methods of outreach and teaching, our escape room attracts and appeals to hard-to-reach audiences by centering around social entertainment, gaming, and storytelling. As evidence of this, so far we’ve reached a wide variety of audiences, including students, staff, our campus museum, and a digital humanities course on Storytelling in the Digital Age.

Our presentation will cover the process we employed to create our escape room, including the challenges and opportunities we encountered collaborating with Dartmouth’s engineering school, special collections library, and media center. We will discuss escape rooms as a method for engagement and learning, and end with exploring the outcomes of our project.